


Shaping

by Leyenn



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:20:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rogue finds there is someone she can connect to, at least in some way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shaping

**Author's Note:**

> Post-_X2_. Written for stephie_penguin for the Femslash Ficathon.

Rogue has her own room now, full of polished wood, a uniform hanging in the closet. Bobby sleeps next door, but never in here. Not since Jean.

Nothing, since Jean.

He trains, hard, and she worries about him but offers nothing more than what they had, a single kiss in a house gone insane. He wants to go back to them; she pretends not to know how much, nor how it hurts inside.

The mansion is her family now. The uniform describes her name, her life, her reason. Xavier is her father; Erik his long-lost _Lebensgefährte_, a second parent, with her in memory if not in life. She hates him of course, mostly, but in family that's hardly something new.

Bobby doesn't understand that. It would be a lie to say she minds.

It's still cold here, some nights.

She tugs the comforter around her shoulders, tighter. She sleeps naked: not for the sensuality of it, but for the freedom. An unheard shout to the world that this mutant is what she is, nothing more or less. She feels that, since Jean; she owes it to her, to her team. Leather by day and bare skin by night describes her life now.

There's a knock at the door, heavy behind the thick wood. She jumps. (Erik chuckles at that display of childishness. She's no child any longer.)

"Who is it?"

The door doesn't open when Kitty comes through, but she's used to that. She sits up before noticing the cold, and noticing Kitty notice her.

"Oh, sorry-"

"S'okay." There's always a robe somewhere in here, the silky mirror to Kitty's safe and sensible terrycloth wrapped all over freckled skin. "Something up?"

Kitty shuffles forward on the cold floor, odd for a girl so fluid. "I - I couldn't sleep."

It's not unusual to hear, these days. She shrugs the robe over her shoulders and fumbles past the sheets. "You want to sit and talk for a while?" They would do that, some nights, when Jubes felt talkative or they had no class and too much Pepsi; sit around and talk about make up, college applications, most of all Bobby and John and Piotr and all the mutant boys still out there waiting for three young women with everything to offer and nothing to give away.

Jubes is hardly ever talkative any more. She worries that Kitty is too much alone now.

"Yeah."

She shifts over on the bed, enough that she is admitting, silently, the need for company. Her hand lunges for gloves on the nightstand.

"It's your room. Let me." Lycra satin pulled through her fingers, and she lets her grip fall slack. The black fabric gathers at thin elbows in the shadow of cloth; those birdlike arms are only lightly muscled, but still lithe when she crouches across the bed and leans into the fattest pillows. Catlike, all but, and Rogue can see this girl in leather and skin a year from now. (Logan remembers that the Professor is training this kid, has already used her once.) Perhaps less.

She leans back against the wall, close enough to Kitty's shoulder that they move together, a little, in the quiet. There's comfort in this girl's presence, something missing in Jubes and Bobby and Logan and Storm, something missing even in the Professor and his occasional, careful touch in her thoughts. Kitty is Jubilee's polar opposite, the slow-burning spark to Bobby's ice. Kitty would never want to kiss her, or risk everything in touching her, leaning close enough to feel the warmth of her skin without hot satin in between. Kitty is the shadow in the dark, legs long beside her own, cloth brushing silk, somehow touching her shoulder with new fingers in familiar satin. "Aren't you lonely in here all on your own?"

She shrugs, slow enough to let that touching hand rise and fall on her sheltered skin. "Sometimes. It's not really so bad."

"I get lonely." Fingers becoming familiar curve around her arm, roots that bind her to the wavering voice at her ear. "I have dreams about them coming for us."

"Coming back," she says, because it's true and they can't hide from it. They're not safe here, even here, even now. "So do I... I think everyone does."

"We hid in the woods. It was cold and they were all scared. I didn't know what to do..." Kitty's voice shakes, and she forgets just for a second, she forgets - that her skin should not be this close, that she shouldn't make out freckles in the dim light, that she can't lean in and offer the comfort of soft lips quieting the fear.

But she _forgets_, and so she does, and she feels it for a second. The terror. The quiet of the cold and the darkness and the sharp bite of wood cracking under her bare feet and running, just running to anywhere and nowhere, gasping breaths between dives that take her through trees and searchlights with equal speed-

And then a breath, sucked into a throat not hers, and held, and the shiver of fingers falling through her shoulder.

Kitty moves away: the rub of satin finds her watching those fingers encased in black slip from inside her skin, eerie and wonderful, frightening and feeling of nothing at all. She wants to breathe and see icy air form from her lips; she can settle only for a quick dart of fingertips, dipping into cloth and skin without distinction. It feels like nothing and it's more than enough.

After that there are endless moments of blue-grey eyes meeting her own, long reddish hair too ordinary when white is falling around her vision. Scar tissue, brought to nothing by the touch of a hand that can slip inside her anywhere, in this moment, right now. She wonders that she never imagined it before, but then creative isn't Rogue. Creative was Marie at the piano dreaming of Canada, long-lost to this room in this unsafe life.

Kitty watches her through the darkness, a hot shadow. When she reaches again it's with a smoothed hand, barely close enough to slip atoms between atoms, just as if to smudge the darkness around them. She paints a tingle of feeling through the edges of untouched skin, arm and shoulder and wrist, and then a soft caress into breathless parted lips. A control so fine that it aches to see it so close, to feel the mutter of it at the very corner of her self, her angry skin grasping and pulling in barely anything at all.

"I have dreams about them coming," Kitty whispers into the quiet. "You'll have them too..."

"I know," she can smile through it, that fear, it's so small. A young woman's dreams have nothing to frighten her any more. "It's worth it." She reaches, waiting a breath for that control to tighten, and then this is all there is - lips on and in and through and over her own, another body inside her skin and a single moment when she can touch, she can feel, and she knows that this is what this _mutant_ is, this, controlled and out of control, all potential locked up and a shadow cat just turning the key.

(David smiles. She's no child any longer.)

  


*

  



End file.
